There’s a pretty sur­pris­ing mis­take in today’s NYT story about yesterday’s interest-​rate cut. The offend­ing sen­tence comes in the second para­graph of Steven R. Weisman’s article:

The Fed’s action brought the fed­eral funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — to 2 per­cent, from 2.25 per­cent, the lowest level since Novem­ber 2004.

The prob­lem is that clause between em-​dashes. The “rate [the Fed] charges banks for overnight loans” is not the fed­eral funds rate, it’s the dis­count rate. The fed­eral funds rate is the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans, which rate the Fed is able to con­trol through open-​market operations.

As the head­line of this post indi­cates, I was about to put this down to a brief slip of edi­to­r­ial atten­tion, but look­ing back through the NYT archive, it looks like a fairly common error on the paper’s part. Here’s a sim­i­lar sen­tence from an arti­cle Weis­man wrote a few days ago:

The com­mit­tee also low­ered the fed­eral funds rate, the rate it charges banks for overnight loans, by three-​quarters of a point, to the cur­rent 2.25 percent.

And here’s another from an arti­cle in March, this one writ­ten by Edmund L. Andrews:

The cen­tral bank low­ered its fed­eral funds rate — the rate it charges banks for overnight loans — by three-​quarters of a per­cent­age point, to 2.25 per­cent, and left the door open to addi­tional rate cuts in the months ahead.

In case you don’t trust me on this, here’s how Reuters (cor­rectly) described the fed­eral funds rate in a story about yesterday’s cut:

The cen­tral bank’s action takes the bell­wether fed­eral funds rate target, which banks charge each other for overnight loans, to 2 per­cent — the lowest since Decem­ber 2004.

And for good mea­sure, here’s the AP’s version:

The latest Fed move brought the fed­eral funds rate — the inter­est that banks charge each other — down to 2.25 per­cent, the lowest since late 2004.